by M. G. Reyes
“So,” Candace said coyly. “How was it?”
“Your momma never told you?” John-Michael replied archly. “Nice boys don’t kiss and tell.”
Grace found herself blushing on behalf of the two boys, neither of whom seemed eager to say any more. She guessed that it might be different in front of other guys. But Candace’s slightly mocking tone was pretty off-putting, even to Grace.
Grace broke in: “So how come you couldn’t go live with Tito when your dad kicked you out?”
“His family didn’t know he was gay. No one knew, only me. I was stupid enough to come out to my dad.”
“Can’t have been easy,” said Grace.
But despite Grace’s efforts to alter the direction of the conversation, Candace seemed determined to bring it back to sex. “What about you, Lucy?” she said. “What’s your number?”
Lucy merely smiled. “As in, how many guys? Sugar, you think I’m gonna give up that particular piece of information?”
“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.” John-Michael grinned.
“I’ll take some of that action,” Candace said. “Mine is easy to remember—two. Lame and lamer.”
“Who’s lame—them, or you for choosing them?” Grace said. “Okay, I’m in, too. Mine is a one. And he was kind of sweet. I liked him a lot.”
Maya asked, “What happened?”
“Oh, you know. Possessiveness, clinginess, whining.”
“True,” Candace said. “You were kind of unnecessarily mean to him.”
Paolo said, “Okay, so we’ll assume Maya is a zero, on account of her extreme youth—”
“Hey!” Maya interrupted. “I’m only a year younger than you!”
He turned to her. “Am I wrong?”
She shrugged. “Ehh. Okay, it’s true. I’m a good Catholic girl.”
“Okay, so I’m on a two,” Candace said. “Grace has one, Lucy isn’t telling, and John-Michael . . . ? How many guys have you ah . . . serviced?”
“A few.”
Candace said insistently, “Be specific.”
“Maybe twenty? I don’t remember.”
They were all a little shocked by this, although Paolo pretended otherwise. “You rascal.”
John-Michael followed his lead, putting on a posh English accent and shaking his head with mock regret. “I know. I’m an absolute cad.”
Candace laughed with delight at their performance. Grace watched for a moment as Candace drained her glass and filled it up again, almost to the brim. It was at least her third glass. No wonder she was being so outrageous. She already sounded drunk. And it was just getting worse. Candace turned to Paolo. “What about you, Cougar Boy?”
Grace flinched at the nickname. It was easier to forget how dumb it was to have a crush on Paolo when she wasn’t reminded of his popularity with those women at the country club. “Candace, let’s drop this.”
Her stepsister turned to Grace with a look of amused disbelief. “Come on! We’re finally getting somewhere interesting with these bozos.”
Grace replied, “Maybe they don’t want to go there?”
Maya added, “Plus, some of us don’t have any stories to share. It’s kind of one-sided.”
Paolo merely leaned back, took a sip of wine, and raised his glass with an enigmatic smile. “Like our boy John-Michael says, a nice guy doesn’t kiss and tell.”
“But methinks thou liest,” Candace said, slipping into her best Shakespearean English. “The word on the street, Master Paolo, is that thou art nothing but a goatish knave.”
Amid the laughter that ensued, Paolo smirked and mimed picking up a phone. “Hey, Candace, the British called. They want their accent back.”
“Ha, bloody, ha,” Candace replied with a dramatic flounce. As if in a mood of reconciliation, she raised a glass. “So now we know about everyone—except Lucy. To Lucy giving up her number.”
To Grace’s irritation, the rest of the housemates cheered. Lucy shook her head in resignation, smiled a drowsy smile. “What a bunch of sex-obsessed children.”
“Guilty,” Paolo said emphatically, his hand on his wineglass. “Now, Lucy, ’fess up.”
Grace shook her head. “Come on, guys. Some people don’t like to talk about this.”
Candace stuck out her tongue. “Jeez, what’s with all the prudery?”
Grace replied quickly, “You didn’t enjoy doing it, so now you have to make it all into some big joke?”
Candace laughed in a way that struck Grace as cynical, an imitation of Candace’s mother, Katelyn. “Well, if you can’t laugh at stuff like this . . .”
Lucy sighed. “I don’t mind telling. It’s not like I’d be the only blabbermouth around here. . . .”
There was another cheer for Lucy’s being a good sport. “Are we counting everything?” she asked. “Or does it have to be the all the way?”
“Fourth base,” Candace confirmed with a satisfied nod.
“Okay. In that case,” she said very slowly. “My number . . . is zero.”
They all gasped. Maya began to grin. She held high her right palm to Lucy. “Yeah, baby! Virgins unite!”
Lucy high-fived Maya. She threw the others a defiant stare. Candace and John-Michael joined in with some good-humored, if ribald jeering.
Paolo, however, seemed transfixed. He couldn’t look away from Lucy. Grace couldn’t tell if he was appalled or enthralled. She felt the familiar stirrings of jealousy once again.
LUCY
THIRD FLOOR, TUESDAY, APRIL 21
“Candace and I are gonna go up to the room,” Lucy said. “Maybe take a couple of hits on the bong. Grace, you want in?”
“But there’s all that food left over.” Grace hesitated, but walked with them up the stairs. “We’ll just wind up eating even more.”
Maya lagged behind them a few steps. John-Michael was dozing in front of the TV, while Paolo had gamely volunteered to clean the kitchen. Maya kept glancing at Lucy, hopeful, expectant. Lucy guessed that she wanted an invitation to hang out with the older girls. When that didn’t happen, Maya seemed to give up and tapped Grace on the shoulder. Lucy could just make out Maya’s words, spoken very softly. “Could I talk to you? About that thing we were talking about . . . the other day.”
Grace’s eyes widened for a split second. Then: “Oh! Yeah, sure.”
The two girls disappeared into their room.
Candace turned to Lucy. “Grace doesn’t really like to do drugs. If it weren’t for me, she probably never would have.”
“You’re the bad influence?” Lucy said with the beginnings of a grin.
Candace said lightly, “I’m the bad sister, the bad student, the badass.”
“Yeah?” Lucy’s grin widened. “Oh, I like that.”
The two girls settled into their room, sitting cross-legged at opposite ends of Lucy’s bed. Lucy busied herself with prepping the bong, cleaning out the residue of previous smokes and refilling from the small stash she kept under her mattress in a brown paper bag.
“We probably shouldn’t do this.”
Candace shook her head mournfully. “No-oh.”
“You have that math test tomorrow.”
Candace gave a slow nod. “Algebra.”
“You, me, and a myster-ee.” Lucy smirked. “Solve for x.”
“What mystery?”
“Are you kidding?” Lucy asked. “John-Michael.”
“So?”
“Blood test? Throwing us a party ’cause of the all clear? He knew two, three days ago he didn’t have HIV.”
“He said he was waiting for news on other STDs,” Candace pointed out.
“Yeah, I heard that. But it doesn’t square with the facts.”
“What ‘facts’?”
Lucy put down the bong for a moment. “Lookit. Our boy John-Michael gets a visit from a detective. He freaks, starts riding out in that car of his. Gone all day, one day. Doesn’t say where he’s at. Another day, he goes to San Francisco.”
“He was g
iving Grace a ride to visit her Dead Man Walking.”
“Yeah, sure, I’m not saying there’s no reason. I’m saying it was new. You ever see him go anywhere but school until last week?”
“His dad died, Lucy. I’m sure he was depressed.”
“He hated his dad. Dude was a big fat homophobe. Threw John-Michael out for being gay.”
Candace sighed, a little impatient now. “Yeah, boo-hoo. What’s your point?”
“He told me that he was worried about passing something on to his kids.”
“Is he planning on having any?”
“That was the thing,” Lucy said. “He was glad he wasn’t. So he wouldn’t pass it on.”
“Maybe he meant the gay gene?”
Lucy gave her a stern look. “Gay isn’t as simple as that.”
“Then what?”
“Guys hardly ever pass on HIV to their kids,” Lucy said, recalling the leaflet she’d read when John-Michael was being tested. “So it can’t have been that.”
“Did he ever say it was?”
“No. Now that I think about it, it was me who mentioned HIV first.”
“Do you even know if he got the test?”
Lucy pondered this for a few seconds. Slowly, she said. “Clever.”
“I try.” Candace blinked, as if acknowledging applause.
“Not you; John-Michael.”
“Huh?”
Lucy took out her Zippo lighter. “He let me believe he was checking for HIV. I bet it wasn’t even an STD clinic.”
“So what was he getting tested for?”
“Whatever it is, he didn’t want me to know anything about it.”
“What’s more scary than HIV?”
“Cancer, for one,” Lucy said. “Leukemia.”
“It would majorly suck to get cancer at our age.”
“But it couldn’t have been cancer.”
Candace frowned. “Why not?”
“Dude, did you ever listen in bio?”
“No, I already told you,” Candace replied, pouting. “Bad student, remember?”
“You can’t pass cancer to your kids.”
“Are you sure? None of the cancers?”
Lucy paused, thoughtful.
Candace seemed to warm to her point. “Maybe there’s, like, a kind of cancer that’s inherited. And John-Michael was going to get a DNA test to see if he’s got the gene.”
Lucy took out her smartphone. Inherited cancer? It was news to her. She thought it came from smoking, drinking, and eating unhealthily. Toxins in the environment, not genes. After a couple of minutes tapping on the screen, she sat back, staring. “Well, I’ll be goddamned. You can pass cancer to your kids. All kinds of cancers.”
“Really?” Candace seemed surprised. As though she hadn’t actually believed her theory would turn out to be true.
“Yeah. But mostly it just increases your risk. Having the gene doesn’t definitely give you the disease.”
“Still. That’s a scary thing, to have that in your DNA.”
“Yeah. I don’t know, though.”
“What d’you mean?”
“John-Michael seemed awful scared. Like if the news was bad, he’s definitely getting sick. That’s why I thought HIV. I assumed he’d been injecting drugs, or having unprotected sex.”
“Well, he did say he’d been with a lot of guys.”
“Yeah, but he also said—did you notice?—that he never injected. And he refused to admit if he’d actually had full sex.”
“True. But you can get HIV from oral.”
Lucy fired up the bong, inhaled the cloud of smoke, held it in for three seconds, and then slowly exhaled. She gazed glassily at Candace. “Maybe, but it’s much less likely. HIV ain’t it, Candace. He wasn’t worried because of what he’d been doing. He was worried because of what his dad was doing.”
Lucy was already blissing out as she passed the bong. Candace took a quick hit and then tipped the mouthpiece away from her for a moment, considering. She was finding it harder to follow the thread.
“His dad?” Candace asked. “Where’d you get that?”
“Because that detective sparked all this. I’m sure of that. Something she told him made John-Michael freak. And he started to worry that he had a disease. Maybe . . . maybe he went on those road trips to get the bad thoughts out of his mind? But he couldn’t put it off any more. So he took the test.”
Candace inhaled a second time, sighed, and breathed out. Lucy’s theory was impressively mysterious. John-Michael did indeed seem to be concealing something. But on the other hand, was it even relevant now? Her thoughts were already drifting toward the remains of the strawberry cream cake that John-Michael had baked for dessert.
Sleepily, she commented, “Great that he’s got the all clear.”
Lucy drifted into a world of her own. “Uh-huh.”
Candace’s mouth was beginning to water. “I’m getting some more cake. You want some?”
MAYA
SECOND FLOOR, TUESDAY, APRIL 21
“I told my mom about my problems with dyslexia. She wants to get me extra tutoring.”
Maya watched Grace trying to wrap her head around this sudden adjustment from the group’s alcohol-fueled discussion to what was clearly going to be a more angst-ridden exchange, and not about sex.
It seemed like Grace was going to try to blow it off. “So?” She waved a hand. “Get some extra tutoring. And move on.”
“Gracie, I don’t have time.”
“Because of the thing you’re writing?”
“Because of my app, yeah.”
Grace asked, “Didn’t you finish it already?”
“Doesn’t work like that,” Maya said. “The version I released was just a first version. With software, you’ve got to keep improving it. Like a shark. Keep moving or die.”
“You tell that to your mom?”
“Are you mental? No, I didn’t. She’d go nuts if she thought it was eating into my study time.”
Grace thought for a moment. “So where is your mom these days?”
“Back in Mexico City with my dad. She’s . . . ah . . . she’s flying out to see me in a few months. She has to stay away for a little while before they’ll let her back in. Even on a tourist visa. But when she does, we’re going to go to Disneyland. Can you believe it? All the time they lived here we never went.”
“Your mom wants you to live the American Dream?” Grace asked. “Because she can’t?”
“I wish. What’s more American Dream than writing a piece of software and getting rich and famous for it? She’s got something more traditional in mind.”
“Like what? Marriage and kids?”
“She’s not from the Stone Age, Grace. She’s thinking more along the lines of a college degree. Something respectable like premed, pre-law. At the very least, business.”
“You into any of that?”
“What do you think?” Maya asked. “Business, yeah, maybe. I can see how it could be useful. But no; I want to get into a computer science program. Do this stuff properly.”
“Seriously? Isn’t that an all-male, all-geek program?”
Maya smiled sweetly. “Imagine how popular I’ll be with the admissions boards.”
“It’s true. You’d tick every box.”
Maya rummaged under her pillow for her pajamas. In the bed next to Maya’s Grace was halfway into her own by now, neatly folding her clothes as she discarded them. She was under her sheets a moment later, eyes closing with relief. “Oh man,” she moaned. “How is it that wine makes you so wretchedly drunk so quickly? I’m sure I didn’t drink more than four glasses. But I feel like I’m going to be so hung over.”
“Drink water,” Maya advised. “My mom always told me that. One glass for every glass you drank. It hydrates you.”
“So I have to be up all night dying to pee?”
Maya shrugged. “I’m just telling you how to avoid a hangover.”
Grace stretched both arms until they hit the head
board. “I heard that a good bacon and eggs breakfast is the solution. Lots of fat and protein.”
“Sounds good. First one up fixes that for everyone?”
Drowsily, Grace replied, “Sure. But only if I can have the bathroom first.”
Maya thought for a moment. They’d left Paolo and John-Michael downstairs, sitting down to watch some Banshee. They’d probably be there for an hour at least. Grace looked and sounded as though she was headed pretty swiftly to sleep. And Lucy and Candace had disappeared upstairs to smoke.
There was a solid chance that Maya would be undisturbed for the next half hour. She plucked her toiletries bag from their shared nightstand and grabbed a toothbrush, floss, and makeup remover. A quick glance at Grace confirmed that she was almost out. When Maya returned from the bathroom, Grace had rolled onto her side, facing away. She didn’t reply when Maya softly called her name.
Satisfied that the time was right, Maya sat at her desk and switched on her laptop. She released a shallow, regretful sigh. After the buzz of the dinner party, she was plummeting back to the miserable deceit of spying on her housemates.
There was no question of refusing the assignment. There’d been enough at stake before she moved into the beach house. But now? It would be like getting fast-tracked out of paradise and straight to the back of the line.
And those were just the consequences for Maya. She didn’t need reminding that it wasn’t only her own future that was at risk.
She stared at the screen for a full three minutes before she could bring herself to type a single letter. The familiar nausea had already begun. Self-loathing. Who knew it was an actual, physical thing?
Lucy is getting more serious about her music. That’s all she really talks about. Very little info about her life before coming to LA. She’s even been getting John-Michael to take his guitar out. They were friends years back, in rock camp, and now she’s trying to get him to start up again. I get the impression that Lucy worries about John-Michael. She’s been having issues with school, too. They can be pretty strict at Our Lady. She’s been in detention some. She doesn’t seem at all interested in Grace.
Grace.
Maya hesitated. She was finding it hard to get a handle on the girl. She didn’t seem to do anything but read books, watch TV, and do her homework. Oh—and write the letters to the death row guys. Maybe if Maya could read the letters she’d have more to tell. But Grace was intensely private about them. Maya hadn’t been able to hack into her computer, and the box where she kept the handwritten ones was locked with an eight-number combination padlock.